The inspiration and uplift of the morning were gone; the sun was sinking to a colder and colder setting.  All the vital forces of the world were running down.  A lethargy seized our travellers.  An effort was required merely to contemplate treading the mill during the three remaining hours of daylight, a greater effort to accomplish the first step of it, and an infinite series of ever-increasing efforts to make the successive steps of that long afternoon.  The mind became weary.  And now the North increased by ever so little the pressure against them, sharpening the cold by a trifle; adding a few flakes’ weight to the snow they must lift on their shoes; throwing into the vista before them a deeper, chillier tone of gray discouragement; intensifying the loneliness; giving to the winds of desolation a voice.  Well the great antagonist knew she could not thus stop these men, but so, little by little, she ground them down, wore away the excess of their vitality, reduced them to grim plodding, so that at the moment she would hold them weakened to her purposes.  They made no sign, for they were of the great men of the earth, but they bent to the familiar touch of many little fingers pushing them back.

Now the sun did indeed swing to the horizon, so that there remained scant daylight.

“Chac, Billy!” cried Sam, who again wielded the whip.

Slowly, wearily, the little party turned aside.  In the grove of spruce the snow clung thick and heavy.  A cold blackness enveloped them like a damp blanket.  Wind, dying with the sun, shook the snow from the trees and cried mournfully in their tops.  Gray settled on the landscape, palpable, real, extinguishing the world.  It was the second dreadful hour of the day, the hour when the man, weary, discouraged, the sweat of travel freezing on him, must still address himself to the task of making a home in the wilderness.

Again the sledge was turned on its side.  Dick and May-may-gwan removed their snow-shoes, and, using them as shovels, began vigorously to scrape and dig away the snow.  Sam unstrapped the axe and went for firewood.  He cut it with little tentative strokes, for in the intense cold the steel was almost as brittle as glass.

Now a square of ground flanked by high snow walls was laid bare.  The two then stripped boughs of balsam with which to carpet all one end of it.  They unharnessed the dogs, and laid the sledge across one end of the clear space, covering it with branches in order to keep the dogs from gnawing the moose-skin wrapper.  It was already quite dark.

But at this point Sam returned with fuel.  At once the three set about laying a fire nearly across the end of the cleared space opposite the sledge.  In a moment a tiny flame cast the first wavering shadows against the darkness.  Silently the inimical forces of the long day withdrew.